Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) is launching a “disinformation” reporting team, prompting mockery online by those who pointed out the liberal network’s long, sordid history of suppressing information it did not want the public to hear.
What are you talking about? You’ve been little other than a disinformation team for many years. https://t.co/VfpgJ57GKO
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 16, 2022
In October 2020, for example, NPR refused to report on the story of Hunter Biden and his infamous laptop, which suggested that then-Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden had lied about his links to his wayward son’s corrupt foreign business deals.
At the time, NPR tried to justify its lack of reporting on the issue in a newsletter by public editor Kelly McBride:
[T]he biggest reason you haven’t heard much on NPR about the Post story [on Hunter Biden] is that the assertions don’t amount to much.“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” NPR Managing Editor for News Terence Samuel told me. “And quite frankly, that’s where we ended up, this was … a politically driven event and we decided to treat it that way.”
The handful of stories that NPR has produced about the NY Post investigation have been limited to how Facebook and Twitter are restricting distribution of the story or how families of those seeking treatment for addiction are impacted by the portrayal of Hunter Biden’s struggle.
Like other left-leaning outlets, NPR considered the Hunter Biden laptop story “disinformation” — though it has proven to be authentic, and the attempts to dismiss its legitimacy were themselves the only “disinformation” — right before an election.
Earlier, after the 2016 election, NPR’s ombudsman suggested limiting live interviews of conservatives, after this author was interviewed on Morning Edition and challenged NPR’s reporting, as well as its focus on racial content in programming.
NPR’s new “disinformation” team comes just weeks after the Biden administration’s attempt to set up a “disinformation” panel within the Department of Homeland Security collapsed amid public scrutiny of the views of its would-be leader.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.